On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 12:06:22AM -0500, tamouse mailing lists wrote: > It's Friday, so... > > Yes, it's true, I have just started looking at using PDO instead of > mysqli -- a bit behind the times... > > My question at this stage, is do people tend to extend the PDO class > for their own use, or encapsulate it in a class (or do most people use > it mostly in procedural code?) I encapsulated it in my own database class. One reason for that is that the PDO "class" is really two classes, which is fine for low level drivers but not production code that I have to use daily. A second reason is that many of the methods are not really necessary in a production environment. I want to limit the methods my code uses to interact with the database. Third, I wanted to handle errors and exceptions with my own methods, more suitable to the code I write. For example, a fatal error should only, but always, be issued if the database code is given something illegal to chew on. Anything else, like a failure to return the expected result, should simply yield some sort of sentinal value or something. If *my code* ever gives the database library something illegal to chew on, then it should only be because of my bad code, not because a user managed to somehow get bad data through. That is, my code should always catch illegal data before it ever gets to the database library. Fourth, encapsulation means that I can have the class itself carry around some of the data that I would normally have to explicitly pass around among functions. This way, I make that useful data (like the number of records returned from the last fetch), part of the "payload" of the class itself. Extension is tricky and requires a more subtle and refined knowledge of the classes involved. Besides, it exposes methods which I would prefer not be used by my code. Encapsulation limits the methods of the classes to just what I deem necessary and no more. I can always write new methods if I need them. Paul -- Paul M. Foster http://noferblatz.com http://quillandmouse.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
